


Shoulder to Shoulder

by brraveheart



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Peggy Carter Lives, Peggy Carter is the Winter Soldier, and she has the serum, because Bucky's still the Winter Soldier, only not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:46:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2729555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brraveheart/pseuds/brraveheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both fell. No one followed. “Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe they exist. The ones that do have names for them. They call the man the Winter Soldier. The woman’s called the Siren. They’ve been credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shoulder to Shoulder

**Author's Note:**

> Because my masochism knows no bounds, I’ve decided to take up writing Steggy AUs, to lament over all the could-have-beens. This time, it’s a sort-of Winter Soldier AU, and I say sort-of because CA: TWS is still canon. There’s just a bit more to it than that.  
> Now, this got to be pretty long, but I’m also pretty proud of it. It may or may not be followed by another story in Steve’s POV – whether or not that gets written depends entirely on the reception I get from this. Anyway, I hope you guys like reading it – I certainly loved writing it!  
> 

* * *

 

 _the first girl I fell for was a fair and faithful fighter,_  
 _she smoldered with a will to save the world._  
 _I did my best to help her, yeah I stood shoulder_  
 _to shoulder,_  
 _on the front lines with my visionary girl._ – “Substitute”, Frank Turner

* * *

 They called her the Siren.

They said she was to be his partner.

She looked familiar, all dark eyes and hair, red smeared on her lips. A precious thing, he remembers. A precious thing, to be protected, because he loved her, loved her, loves her?

The memories are jumbled. They don’t fit. _He_ doesn’t love her, but someone else does. A man, skinny – big – scrawny – muscular – he loved her. Blonde, blue, red, white, and he’d been a _punk_ –

A man laughs.

“You will become the new fists of Hydra.”

There is a chair, someone pulling at his arm. Sparks flying, and the woman is screaming. The Siren is screaming. Her eyes are full of fear, full of fear and he doesn’t understand, can’t understand, but a name bubbles up from his throat anyway, warm and chalky and she meant so much to that _boy_ –

“Carter!”

She screams back, pupils blown, brown eyes begging, begging, begging.

“ _Barnes_ –”

The man snaps his fingers.

The pulling stops. The screaming stops.

“Put them on ice.”

* * *

 

She remembers falling.

Fingers stretching, fingers clenching – there’d been a man, two men. One with sky eyes, the other with eyes like the Atlantic. One of them had been the Winter Soldier, she thinks. Dark, dark, dark. She’d reached for him because he was something to be saved at all costs. He was precious to someone. Someone. Someone who’d been precious to her.

Nobody is precious to her.

The Winter Soldier comes close, but that is only out of necessity, out of what her handlers expect.

Nobody is precious to her.

Still she reaches, despite the thousand-foot drop below. She grabs the man’s sleeve, but her arms are not long enough and her other hand lets go of the railing. His follow suit, too numb to hang on, and the other man is yelling, screaming like the noise will make a difference.

He says something she doesn’t quite catch, and the last thing she ever sees are his eyes, those sky-eyes and they are filling with tears and she wants to tell him not to cry, don’t cry, sweet boy, kind boy, precious boy – I’m here, I’m here.

I’m still right here.

* * *

 

The years fall like sand through his fingertips.

Things change. His handlers change, are always different when he comes from the ice. The only thing that remains is _her_ – the Siren, his silent watchwoman, his blind spot’s eyes.

She is useful, he thinks. Dependable. They’ve given them each other for a reason, and it’s a good reason. She doesn’t hinder him, like the teams they sometimes send with them, during missions. She is as silent as a shadow by his side, and he is the same. They work as one, as a unit, one body split in two.

( _he wishes he could say something to her, anything_ )

They are the same. They are weapons, two parts of a desired whole.

( _but what is there to say?_ )

She is his constant.

* * *

 

There’s this woman.

She appears in the Siren’s dreams, always dressed differently. The Winter Soldier doesn’t dream when he’s put into the ice – she doesn’t think he does, anyway; if he does, he’s never shared anything with her. She’s not sure she’s supposed to dream at all. But she does, anyway, and the woman is always there.

She’s beautiful. Looks like her, a bit, but different. More polished. Her hair is shorter, curled and brushing her shoulders. Her eyes are dark and happy. Her smile, white with red lips.

Sometimes there’s a man with her. Usually not. But when there is, he looks familiar too – blonde and in a uniform, sometimes brown, sometimes with stars, but usually not. Sometimes he is skinny, too tiny to be healthy, in an oversized white shirt and military-issue trousers. Sometimes she doesn’t know what his body looks like, but he is there, just him, just smiling, just laughing, just holding the woman’s hand like she’s everything he ever wanted.

His eyes are sky-blue, and God, doesn’t that sound familiar?

* * *

 

He dreams.

He doesn’t tell anyone, but he does. It’s usually of a man, one he can’t remember after the electroshocks, and sometimes he wonders how many dreams he’s forgotten because of those blasted things.

Anyway. The man.

He is skinny or he is big, blonde and with eyes bluer than Karpov’s. He throws up on the Cyclone at Coney Island and that doesn’t make sense, not at all, but it’s what happens. He falls asleep at the strangest times and can never finish a drink he starts, and he cried when his mother died. He likes to fight, but not for the sake of fighting – he’s strange and he fights to end it.

A little guy fighting for the little guy.

Isn’t that what they’d said?

They take the little guy and they make him a big guy, give him a body that matches that stupid oversized heart and they turn him into a soldier, they send him off to fight, and the Winter Soldier’s screaming because that’s not okay, that’s not alright, he’s too much of a self-sacrificing bastard and he’s gonna get himself _killed_ but he doesn’t care and they don’t care and the only one who even remotely cares besides him is the soldier girl with the fear-dark-eyes and… and…

And they put the electroshocks on him again because he’s being a problem, and the Siren’s watching from across the room, and the Winter Soldier really wishes he remembers what he said, so he knows why her face is so pale.

* * *

 

They make them train children. Break them, shatter them, put them back together with the best pieces.

It is their order, and she cannot disobey it.

She trains a girl called Natalia, once, and they call her the Black Widow. She is a small girl, all red hair and eyes dark with experience, even so young. It’s not hard, breaking her, but it’s oddly difficult to watch her shatter.

I’m sorry, she wants to tell her, the small, broken thing in the snow. I’m sorry, she wants to say, but cannot for the life of her explain why.

* * *

He is given a mission, once, in the 1980s. It’s one of the few she does not follow him on.

He’s meant to kill a man called Howard Stark. A founder of an organization called SHIELD. A political enemy, an enemy in general. The file mentions a family – a wife, a son, but that’s inconsequential, possible collateral, but nothing to be concerned over.

He is instructed to kill this man and he does, appears in the road on a dark winter night. The driver swerves to avoid a ghost, sends himself and the woman in the passenger’s side careening off a ledge. The car goes up in flames, and the Winter Soldier walks away, wondering at that look on Howard Stark’s face, wondering at the way his eyes widened, like he’d seen a ghost.

* * *

 

The next time they are both taken out of the ice, it’s 2013.

It is also the last time they are both taken out of the ice, coincidentally.

The order tells them to kill Nick Fury, and they do – the Winter Soldier shoots him through a window as the Siren watches, body tensed and poised to shoot the man who comes after her partner.

She stops.

Red, white, blue like the sky.

In his eyes.

Her hand trembles and she pulls the trigger, but the bullet misses by a hair. Captain America jerks back, startled, and she watches as he retreats, eyes trained on the shadows. She stays hidden, stays quiet, ever the good little spy until he is long gone.

She meets the Winter Soldier at the rendezvous point. She expects disappointment, even anger at her incompetence, but instead he just looks confused, Atlantic-ocean eyes watching her closely. “Why didn’t you kill him?” he asks her in Russian, and she’s quiet, quiet for a long while.

“I don’t know,” she answers back eventually, this time in English. “I think I knew him.”

* * *

 

_Who are they?_

_Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe they exist. The ones that do have names for them. They call the man the Winter Soldier. The woman’s called the Siren. They’ve been credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years._

* * *

 

She is there on the bridge.

Captain America is there. The Winter Soldier engages him quickly, leaves the other two to her – a man, a soldier, but a young one, and she crushes him quickly. He reminds her of someone, of plenty of someones, the young bucks at basic.

_Faster, ladies! Come on, my grandmother has more life in her – God rest her soul._

The Siren sucks in a sharp breath. What in the…?

But as soon as the man is gone, another takes his place. A woman, lither, quicker, deadlier. She is red-haired and familiar, very familiar, eyes dark with experience and something else.

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I cannot for the life of me explain why._

The voices clamor inside her head but she tries to pay them no mind; she lands a bullet in the woman’s shoulder and she’s looking at her with something close to fear. The Siren knows she should kill her, knows she has the opportunity to put one more bullet between the woman’s eyes – the woman seems to know it, too – but she hesitates for a moment too long and then there is a shield flying out of nowhere.

She whips around, ducks to avoid the crushing impact. The Winter Soldier catches the thing where it falls and tosses it with devastating force back to its owner – the blonde.

He dodges the object before retrieving it, and comes after her, next – probably think she’s weaker, a liability, a chip in her partner’s armor, as so many do. She fights back, though, and he is surprisingly steady on his feet as she lands blow after blow on his shield – familiar, too, familiar like his eyes.

_You said you thought I was meant for more than this. Did you mean that?_

_Every word._

Blow after blow, and she’s usually silent during these fights, but one last punch wrenches a battle cry from her lips, her fist connecting hard enough to send him staggering back a few feet. The Winter Soldier is there too, suddenly, reaching for him, and she has the strangest urge to yank their opponent away, to guard him.

A gunshot rings through the air before she can make sense of her jumbled reasoning, however, slicing the air and the side of her mask.

It cracks, splinters and breaks away from her face. She catches the redheaded woman on the other side of the street, arm raised, looking terrified. Her hand is steady where it holds the gun, however, and the Siren feels a rush of sudden pride, pride and confusion and something else.

She wants to say something, but the man’s voice stops her, broken and amazed and just the slightest bit breathless.

“Peggy?”

She looks to him, something bright and golden fluttering across her memories. The Winter Soldier is not protective by nature, but he is loyal, and stands before her as a shield. His eyes are narrowed, processing.

“Who the hell is Peggy?”

The other man’s eyes widen at the sound of the Soldier’s hoarse, low voice, recognition skittering across those pretty blue irises. He opens his mouth to say something to them, to both of them, but one of them must move because the sound of the woman’s next gunshot makes the air ring again, and suddenly she’s grabbing her partner by the back of his collar and tugging him away.

Her heart is racing.

* * *

 

She stops him when he flings the medic across the room.

Her hand, soft, flesh, is on his metal one. The soldiers have guns on him, guns that don’t work, not for the likes of him. He looks into her eyes and sees brown and familiar, dark and constant. They had sparkled once, those eyes. They had sparkled with something happy, something strange and foreign but not altogether bad.

She had been proper once – he’d called her “your highness” and her hair had been shorter. It hadn’t been this long, swept and parted to one side, and she hadn’t had that red star tattoo behind her left ear. She hadn’t always been so cold, so calculated. She’d been kind once, and so had he, he thinks. They’d been kinder than this. Softer. They’d had compassion, before.

They hadn’t always been so –

Fire blooms across his cheek and his head snaps to one side. The Siren reels back, as startled as he is, her hand moving from his. Fists form in her lap.

“Mission report. Now,” the handler they call Pierce barks.

The Winter Soldier looks up and considers what he’s saying for a moment, before swallowing. “That man,” he begins, softly, thinking back to that strange anomaly of a man. There had been something familiar in his punches, something that spoke of warm summer days and brawls in parks.

Pierce looks at him expectantly. The Siren doesn’t look anywhere, just her hands, still in her lap.

“That man on the bridge. Who was he? I…” he swallows, trying to find the words. “I knew him.” the Winter Soldier frowns, looks over at his partner. She’s still as death, sitting there, neither supporting or denying his statements.

Pierce’s eyes soften, but that doesn’t help the fact they still look like snake eyes, as icy and as blue as Karpov’s had been, once. “You met him earlier this week on another assignment.”

The Siren’s head snaps up and she looks confused, looks like she wants to say something. But Pierce barrels on before she can open her mouth, talking about defense and offense and how they’d shaped the century, they just needed to do it one last time.

The Winter Soldier isn’t soothed by his voice, as he had been in the past. His mind keeps reeling back to the man on the bridge, the man who should’ve been smaller than he is, the _punk_ who –

“But we knew him.”

The Siren’s voice is hoarse and tiny in the cavernous laboratory. The Winter Soldier doesn’t look at her, but he looks at Pierce, and the other man doesn’t look happy. He looks faintly annoyed, actually, and the Soldier’s muscles tighten, already anticipating what happens next.

“Prep them.”

The scientists hesitate. “They’ve been out of cryo freeze too long, sir…”

“Then wipe them, and start over.”

The Siren is first. The Siren is always first when they do this. “Ladies first,” one of their handlers used to say before switching on the machine. Her screams are deafening. Only fitting, he supposes, given her name.

It’s always hard, hearing her hurt – it makes him squirm, uncomfortable with an emotion he can’t name.

It feels sort of like failure, but it seeps in deeper than that, curls inside his chest and makes it ache.

* * *

 

She finds them, later, after everything.

When Pierce is dead and the carriers are down, she finds them, sprawled together on the sand by the water. They’re very still.

Still as death.

Her heart is racing erratically in her chest until she checks their pulses, until her fingers press against the thready, fluttering things on their necks. A sigh escapes her, and a strange emotion floods her – relief? Why is she relieved? One of these men is the enemy, and the other a liability, if he’s able to be taken down like this, without even killing his target.

It’s what her mind tells her, anyway. But her heart is happy, and she feels warm, strangely and absurdly warm.

The man, the blonde, wakes up eventually, for a moment. His eyes creak open and she stiffens, waiting for him to lash out, to say something dreadful. But instead he smiles, showing his teeth, lovely and bloody there on the sand.

“You’re late. And you still owe me a dance, you know.”

She would’ve replied, but there’s a sting at the back of her neck, and numbness floods her.

She catches his eyes, widening in surprise, before she slumps forward, her world falling to black.

* * *

 

_They’re strapped to tables, and the room is dark and terrifying and he hurts all over, but not half as much as the woman next to him must._

_“Carter? Carter, can you hear me? It’s Barnes.”_

_Hours pass like clouds on a summer sky. His world spins in a dizzying blend of light and color, death and drugs coming together and making him loopy, making him deathly aware of everything._

_“Wow, Carter, some trip you signed up on. I bet if you knew this was gonna happen, you’d have never come along.”_

_She is still, he sees, so still and pale in the corner of his eye. He wonders if she’s dead. Hopes, selfishly, viciously, that she’s not._

_“Carter. You’re gonna need to wake up soon. They’ll be mad if you sleep through the best part.”_

_No reply. She’s so still. So_ small _._

_He wonders if she’s gone cold yet._

_“Carter?”_

_Her eyelids don’t even flutter, and if her chest moves, the movement is small, too small to matter._

_“Carter,” he says, getting desperate, getting scared. “Carter, you need to wake up now.”_

_She doesn’t._

_“You need to wake up now.”_

* * *

 

The days after are the hardest.

She is angry, more volatile than he is, surprisingly – they separate them and she paces the confines of her cage like an angry tiger. She’d nearly escaped, that first day, had hissed and struggled and managed to wrestle a gun away from one of her guards. The woman, the redheaded one from the bridge, had grabbed it, grabbed her, overpowered her.

Any other day, this would not have happened. But she is weak this time, exhausted and sluggish with the chemicals from the tranquilizer darts still running through her veins. Her partner is much the same, still sleeping, hurt beyond what the serum could repair.

It’s all they tell her, when she asks – that he’s still asleep. It makes her stomach roll, her blood turn chilly with all the implications. It takes her a while to pinpoint the feeling, the _emotion_ , to name it, and when she does she calls it _worry_. She’s _worried_.

It’s absurd, the mere notion – but the Winter Soldier is all she’s ever known. They have never been the ones to show affection, but there has always been this consistency – it has always been _them_ , for as long as she can remember. Them against their handlers, against the torture, against the world.

It’s always been them, and now it’s just her.

She’s alone.

* * *

 

_“Steve’s gonna kill me if you die,” he says to her, hoarsely, when the scientists leave. They haven’t touched her, thankfully, the bastards – they’ve taken him through drug-induced hell and back, but they haven’t touched her, thank God._

_She hasn’t stirred, not for days. But they haven’t disposed of her yet, either; she’s still there, strapped to the table next to him. Not dead, he overheard some of the scientists say – not dead, not yet, but not totally alive. There had been other words he hadn’t known. His German was good, but not that good, and her status was lost on him._

_He hoped she wouldn’t die._

_Was that selfish?_

_“Think about it, Carter,” he continues, rasping. God, his chest hurts. His everything hurts, actually, but especially his chest. He’s sure his arm would hurt too, if he had any arm left. Do phantom pains count? “Think about it, Carter.”_

_He repeats her name a few more times, on the off-chance she might hear him and wake up and just talk to him for a little while. He’s a selfish son of a bitch in that regard – a selfish son of a bitch, and God help him if he doesn’t want to die alone._

* * *

 

That man comes. Steve. Steven. Captain America.

She attacks him, the first time. Lunges right for him – no finesse, no elegance, everything she’d ever been taught about precision getting tossed out the window. It takes three guards to restrain her.

 _“Let me see him!”_ she snarls in Russian, thrashing like a wild thing until she feels something prick her in the neck. A syringe. The bastards are drugging her.

_Please, no more, no more, no more needles. Please._

She fights harder, near desperate in her desire to escape, until her heartbeat is forced to slow, and she keeps repeating it, repeating it, repeating it. _“Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me –”_

The last thing she sees are Steve’s eyes, dark and impossibly sad, shining with something unfamiliar. Tears? And he calls himself a soldier. She wants to laugh, she wants to scream, wants to join him and let the tears fall, too. She wants to reach up and touch his cheek.

_Don’t cry, sweet boy. Kind boy. Precious boy._

She wants to tell him it’ll be okay – wants to do something she didn’t, years upon years ago.

_I’m still right here._

* * *

 

_He thinks about Steve a lot._

_Not much else to think about, really. Well, there’s Carter, but he thinks it’s been a few days already and she’s not showing any signs of waking up. The scientists that watch them had talked earlier, about her “adverse reaction” and how they’d have to get the soldiers to take care of her if she didn’t wake up soon._

_He’d yelled at them for that – probably a bad move, for him, and, inevitably, her – but they couldn’t touch her. Wouldn’t. For a number of reasons. First being that it’s his fault she’s there in the first place – second being that she’s Steve’s girl. Or would’ve been Steve’s girl. Could still be Steve’s girl, if they ever got out of that wretched place. Third, she’d taken care of the little punk when he couldn’t, when he was a country away and he was still a scrawny little idiot. Even after that, when he was a bigger idiot. Sure, she’d gotten him into just as much trouble, but she’d cared for him._

_Cares for him._

_He has to stop thinking about her in the third person._

_So, they’d threatened her. And he’d yelled at them. God, he’d yelled so hard his throat was raw. They’d stuck another needle in his arm for all his trouble, sent him screaming for an entirely different reason._

_So. Right. Steve._

_There isn’t much to think about. So he thinks of Steve. The scrawny punk from Brooklyn, the little sick kid, the boy who couldn’t say no to a challenge. The boy who couldn’t back down from injustice of any kind. The boy he’d looked up to, even back when he’d had to look down to meet his eyes._

_Bucky takes a deep breath. He wants to believe Steve will save them. He wants to believe he’ll find them, like last time. He wants to believe that one day he’ll appear and it won’t be just a fever dream, that one day they’ll be back in New York and it’ll all be okay, and he wishes like before was still possible, he wishes he was back in that stupid run-down apartment with that stupid kid from Brooklyn._

_He wants to go back._

* * *

 

The Captain tries to visit again.

He’s flanked by bodyguards, this time, the wary-looking redhead and a man, brown-haired with a satchel of arrows strapped to his back. He looks more terrified than wary, though he hides it well, behind a kind of mask she knows intimately.

“It’s alright, guys,” the Captain says, gently, and the man is out of there in a heartbeat, giving him a quick nod. The woman is slower to leave, watching her warily. The Siren wonders why she’s so familiar.

She leaves, eventually, too. And then it’s just her and the Captain, who takes a seat across from her on the floor. His defenses are down. His shoulders are relaxed. She snarls at him, but he still does not move into a defensive posture, or even an offensive one. She debates attacking him again. Decides against it. Despite their enhanced capabilities, he is still stronger than her, still bigger – she is weaponless, and even if by some miracle she overpowered him, where would she go? She doesn’t know where she is or who waits for her outside those doors, and she’d rather not chance it.

So she watches him. Observes. It’s all she can do, here.

He is handsome, she supposes. Strong jaw, pretty eyes. They look like the sky, she muses, crystal-clear and very blue. His hair is cut short, bristly and blonde, and she wonders why she thinks his hair should be longer, why she thinks it should flop across his forehead.

“You miss Bucky?” he asks, and it takes her a moment to realize he means the Winter Soldier.

She pauses. “Miss” is not quite the right word, although she does wish to know his status. If he is dead, she’ll have to make a mission report. If he is dead, she will have to accommodate.

Somehow, she is not entirely neutral to that prospect.

Eventually, the Siren nods. The Captain does, too, and slides her a folder. She flips it open warily, sucks in a sharp breath at the image of her partner asleep on a white bed, hooked up to this wire and that. A medical file. He’d given her the Soldier’s medical file, or whatever sort of file they kept in this facility.

There is a buzzing noise in the background, but she ignores it, hungry for information. Her eyes take everything in with the sort of precision had been revered by her handlers. The Soldier had always been the brawn, but she had acted as the brain, used to memorize and decode and infiltrate. Her partner could do that, too, of course, but she is quicker, faster, more efficient when it comes to attaining and absorbing information at a glance.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, something in her chest twisting.

It’s the first thing she’s said to him, beyond the hissing threats. But when she looks up at him, he’s smiling. It’s broken and tiny, but it’s still a smile, and it sends her flesh prickling.

“You’re very welcome, Peggy.”

* * *

 

_“Carter? You awake? We’re gonna get out of here soon, I promise.”_

_“C’mon, Carter. You ain’t so frigid you’d make Stevie a war widow, are you?”_

_“I never said thank you. For watching his little punk ass. So thanks for that.”_

_“Thanks for being there.”_

_“Thanks for saving my life, and then trying to save it again, that last time.”_

_“Thanks for loving him.”_

_“Carter?”_

_…_

_“…Peggy?”_

_“Peggy, I’m scared, too.”_

* * *

 

He visits often, when he realizes she’s not about to start trying to kill him every chance she gets.

They talk, or rather, he talks to her. It’s about everything and nothing at all, mundane day-to-day things that might’ve meant something if they were different people. He mentions names sometimes, names that strike a chord in her, but she doesn’t know why. Names like _Stark_ and _Phillips_ and _Bucky_.

Names like _Peggy_.

It’s what he calls her. She asks him why, once, and a shadow passes over his eyes – he’d looked so sad, and she really wishes she hadn’t done that to him, hadn’t made him look like that. She hadn’t apologized, but she’d changed the subject for him, instead asking after the status of the Winter Soldier. That was information he gave her readily, handing over a file if it was handy, or recounting what he was doing.

It’s always sleeping. A coma, Steve says. Nothing physical, but it’s everything mental. The doctors say he’ll wake up when he wants to, after he’s done fighting whatever’s inside him.

She doesn’t much like the sound of that, not at all.

* * *

 

_She wakes up slowly._

_At first he thinks he’s dreaming. Her eyes are dark and sleepy, haunted by something beyond him. “Carter?” he murmurs. “Carter?”_

_Nineteen days, they’d been there. Nineteen days, she’d been asleep, and he’d counted, as best he could. Nineteen days or roundabout, he’d been sitting there talking at her and now he’s talking_ to _her, now her eyes are open and she’s awake._

 _She’s_ awake _._

_He shuts his eyes tight, and she probably doesn’t understand why he’s suddenly begun to tremble so bad._

_She never should’ve woken up._

_Maybe death would’ve been kinder._

* * *

 

She remembers him in fragments.

It starts with the visits – the name “Peggy” sounds familiar, and she likes the taste of it in her mouth, so she doesn’t mind much when he comes and calls her that. She remembers old missions, first, the conditioning wearing off slowly. All those years, all those treatments – they fade slowly, and she remembers the bridge, that night on the rooftops. Before that, she remembers the woman. The redhead. Natalia. Natasha. She remembers Red Room and Leningrad and a whole mash of memories that don’t make much sense – most days, she can’t discern one from the next. Most days, they’re all confusing and bleeding in her head.

They’re messed up. But they’re there, and she takes comfort in that. Steve helps, sometimes, too – he’s eager for her to remember more, from her time before the Siren. He gets permission from whoever’s in charge to let her out, and they take walks sometimes. It’s winter, now, and there’s snow, wherever they are – fresh snow, Steve says. Early snow. It’s only December.

She nods along, walking along beside him. She remembers snow. She remembers cold. Ice. She remembers her partner’s namesake, the way they’d screamed on the way down.

_Don’t let go –_

_Peggy!_

_Barnes, take my hand –_

_Carter, don’t be stupid, get back inside –_

_Peggy, please, I’ll get Bucky –_

_Don’t be stupid, I’ve almost got him, I’ve almost –_

“Peggy?”

She gasps, cold shooting up her legs and settling in her chest. It takes her a moment to realize what’s happened – she’s fallen, knees in the snow, trembling despite her heavy winter clothes.

What had just happened?

She doesn’t quite know – she remembers falling, though. She remembers snow. She remembers the blood staining it.

Sergeant Barnes.

She remembers him, too.

* * *

 

_They turn them into weapons._

_They fill their veins with chemical cocktails until they are close to bursting, and the heavyset scientists that works on them boasts that it’s good enough to rival Erskine’s. Their boss must be happy as a fucking clam, Bucky thinks, one day when the pain is heavy enough to get Carter to start screaming._

_His heart skips a few beats – the pain has always been bad, but she’s never done this before. She’s never screamed._

_He tries to turn and look at her but someone else holds him down, there’s a flash of metal and searing pain at his shoulder. He cries out, his hollering and her screaming reaching a crescendo over the sound of machinery._

* * *

 

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

Steve looks up from staring at Bucky, stares at her instead. She’s still got holes in her memory, but she remembers the gist of it. Her time as the Siren, her time as Agent Carter. She can’t remember much of school, much of her life before SSR – but then, she supposes that life is far too far away to matter much, anymore.

She remembers the train, the fall. Steve must suspect she’s hiding things from him, but he’s been impossibly patient with her.

“What is?” he asks, gently.

“This,” she says, and gestures to Bucky – to the Winter Soldier – lying there on the bed. “I didn’t listen. I tried to get him. We slipped.”

Steve is silent for a long while, and for a moment she fears the worst – that he agrees. But then he shifts closer, not touching her, but close enough that she can feel his body heat through the thick wool of his coat. “You were tryin’ to save him, Pegs. That’s not your fault. What happened to you is not your fault.”

She can’t help but feel at least partially responsible, but his words soothe her however minutely, and her shoulders begin to relax. She nods.

“Yeah. Okay.”

* * *

 

_“…Bucky?”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“I can’t remember what the sky looks like.”_

* * *

 

She gets moved, eventually. They trust her well enough not to run, and with Captain America keeping an eye on her, they don’t think she’ll be going anywhere.

She moves in with him. It’s odd, and the walls of his apartment make her a little claustrophobic. But she’s back to mostly normal, and the shadows don’t seem nearly as intimidating as before. There’s still something, rattling around in her head – remnants of the Siren, nightmares that make her lousy with the crushing anxiety. Still, she supposes she shouldn’t have expected anything less.

Steve himself helps, of course. He sits on the chair in her guest bedroom to help her get to sleep, and when that doesn’t work, slips in next to her, holds her through the worst of it. She trembles like a scared dog, but he is there, he is there, he’s always there and will hopefully always be.

They visit Barnes, too.

It’s become a bit of a ritual, going to look at him. Most times Steve comes, but sometimes he doesn’t – they’d been lifelong friends, him and Steve, but she and Bucky had gone through something – for lack of a better word – _special_.

They’d been through literal hell and back. For years, all they’d had was each other, through the brainwashing and the torture and the sins they’d committed.

She hopes he’ll wake up soon.

She wonders if that’s selfish.

* * *

 

_He thinks the end is near. The scientists don’t come as often anymore, and when they do, they look hungry, like he and Peggy are pieces of meat for their inner wolves._

_He’s gotten delirious with the daily pain, and even her attempts at keeping them both talking are dwindling. Hope is running low, and he doesn’t think they’ll be saved, not this time. But the stupid punk’s face still fills his head every time they drag him under. Sometimes there’s a white dress and confetti, but most times there’s Steve and Peggy and a blonde-haired, brown-eyed kid who calls him “Uncle Buck”. Sometimes there’s someone else, a faceless, imaginary girl that might’ve been real if he stayed alive long enough to meet her._

_“Was it worth it?” he asks her, when everything gets too quiet._

_“Was what worth it?”_

_“Getting dragged here?”_

_It’s not what he means and she knows it. He means everything that’s led up to this point – leaving England, joining the SSR, the harassment and the wolf-whistles and the cold nights and meeting Steve, meeting him, saving both of their sorry asses. She looks exhausted, but her eyes are glittering and she nods, a broken half-smile illuminating her face. She looks years younger, in that instant – the girl he thinks she might’ve still been, if the war hadn’t gotten there first._

_“Shut up. Of course it was.”_

* * *

 

He loves her.

She knows he loves her – she can see it in his eyes, in the light tap of his fingers against her stomach when they’re supposed to be sleeping. In the sweet kisses he presses to her hair. He loves her, God help him, he loves her and she sort of wishes he didn’t. He could certainly do better. There’s this girl, Sharon, who lives down the hall from him – she seems like the good sort, and Peggy’s seen the way she looks at him.

But he loves her. Whether or not he’s in love with her is up for debate.

She’s not sure if she loves him.

She knows she did, once. She knows that once, she’d been helplessly, hopelessly in love with him; she’d loved that boy to the point of breaking, once. Loved him enough to take a chance on a scrawny runt; loved him enough to follow him to her own undoing.

She’d loved him, once.

Whether or not she can love him again is the question.

* * *

 

He wakes up confused.

Memories are jumbled in his head, so jumbled it hurts. But he remembers. He remembers Steve and Peggy, and the war. He remembers Zola, Hydra, Russia, the world as it was seen through the Winter Soldier’s eyes.

The Winter Soldier.

The Siren.

He screams for her, and something inside of him must realize how stupid doing that is, but it must get someone’s attention, because the next second, someone’s there – he’s not alone and they’re trying to tell him to calm down, not touching him but begging him to calm down – _please, Bucky, please. We’re here, we’re here, we’re not going anywhere._

He looks up to see Steve, dumbass that he is, and he’s dressed strange, and he looks strange and he’s too big but he’s still Steve. He’s still Steve. Peggy looms behind him, shock-white and relieved, and sad, and so many other things.

He wishes he knew what to say.

* * *

 

When they heal, he doesn’t leave. Steve.

He doesn’t quite understand. Peggy supposes he never will, not really. He hadn’t _been_ there – and on his worst nights, Bucky will be the one to pick fights with him over it. It’s a low blow, and that’s when Peggy comes in, strokes his metal hand like she would when he’d turn his rage on the scientists of the past.

Peggy has the worst nightmares. Bucky does, too, but he prefers to be alone during those nights – he prefers a lit bedroom, to pace by himself. Peggy needs someone, solid weight on top of her, anchoring her. Sometimes it’s Steve, sometimes it’s Bucky – when it gets really bad she prefers the latter, prefers someone she can pick her memories apart with, someone who _knows_.

These nights, these instances, they don’t change a thing – morning will come and they won’t be alone – Steve will still be there. It doesn’t change the fact that a lifetime ago, she’d gotten her heart stolen by some scrawny cadet from Brooklyn; it doesn’t change the fact that he’d shared his boyhood years with Bucky by his side, dusty old stories lost in the years. It doesn’t change how she feels about them – doesn’t change the fact that she cares about both of them with a ferocity that startles her.

There’s a word for it, she thinks, and she wonders if it’s love. She’s trying to figure that out, still – she’s trying to be somebody who could love somebody.

Steve is patient. He is precious. He is gentle with them both.

“I’ll wait for you,” he tells them, on that one odd night when she’s sandwiched between both boys. Her arms are around Bucky’s torso, legs tangled in his. Steve is behind her, his arms around the both of them, protecting them, anchoring them. “The both of you. I’ll stay, for however long you need me to.”

Bucky’s stiff in her arms so she responds for him, for both of them. “How’s forever sound?” she asks. “Would you stay forever, if we asked?”

There’s a moment of silence. His arms tighten.

“I think I could make that work, yeah.”

Barnes relaxes in their embrace.

* * *

 

When Bucky dreams, he dreams of his best friend and a dingy apartment in Brooklyn, a lifetime back.

Sometimes there’s a white dress, most days there’s not. Always, there’s Peggy. Sometimes she’s not smiling, but most days she is.

Sometimes, there’s a blonde-haired, brown-eyed little kid who calls him “Uncle Buck”. Most days there isn’t, but sometimes there is – sometimes there’s a beach or a park, and sometimes it’s seventy years ago and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes there’s someone else – an imaginary girl that might still be real, somewhere out there. He doesn’t know if he can still meet her or not, but life works in funny ways, and he’d like to think he could, one day.

Sometimes, even he can dream up miracles.

He is eagerly waiting for the day where they no longer have to just be dreams.


End file.
